Don't bother coding from scratch. Any client for whom money is an object, you're better off just hanging out and drinking beers with as you co-plan world domination. Eventually if you ask enough detailed product spec questions the client will realize they are in over their heads, get intimidated and abandon the project. They got off lucky. You got free beer.

Tie boy: Do not try and tie the tie. That's impossible. Instead... only try to realize the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Tie boy: There is no tie.
Neo: There is no tie?
Tie boy: Yes, you jackarse, this is a techie film and people don't wear ties unless they dropped in accidentally from the Wall Street movie set next door.

There once was a first poster from Perth
Who instead of talking about Open Document Format made mirth
He took first post for granted, and talked pizza, backhanded.
Until modded down by European Bureaucrats who.. who... who remanded - oh I got nothing.

Hold on - WHY do you need a CS degree to work as a programmer? Apparently something like 15% of people working at Google nowadays don't have bachelors degrees.
When it comes to hiring developers, if you have relevant experience, that is ALL that is important to MOST companies. Get some web pages together with some interesting Javascript, AngularJS, Backbone, jQuery, whatever. Read a book on developer interview questions and learn how to write a recursive algorithm and reverse an array and perhaps a basic sort or two... this can be done in a day or two. Go find yourself a junior developer position paying $60k per year (not hard in Silicon Valley) and you'll prepare yourself for a $100k job within a year far more effectively than a CS degree... which will prepare you for the $60k job.
If you already know how to code, and you are a self-learner, you are 80% of the way there. Move out to Silicon Valley, start combing through craigslist, and call up companies looking for junior roles (speak with a person, don't just email them a resume). If you get past a phone screen and get to an in-person interview, right there you have at least a 25% shot of getting the job. One, three, five or six interviews later... you will be hired an on your way... figure on up to two or three months.
If you want to make life easier for yourself, hook up with a few tech recruiters. They will line up interviews for you all day long. Just put "developer" somewhere on your LinkedIn profile and they will start to call you.
Stop philosophizing and just move to the center of the action and start acting. It's not as hard as you think.

Well, Grasshopper, or Unschooled Acolyte, or whatever your title of choice may be...

You did not hear this from me.

But most developers belong to the Church of Pain and we pride ourselves on our arcane talents, strange cryptic mumblings and most of all, the rewards due the High Priesthood to which we strive to belong.

Let me put it bluntly. Some of this very complicated logic is complicated because it's very complicated. And pretty little tools would do both the complexity and us injustice, as high priests or priests-in-training of these magical codes.

One day we will embrace simple graphical tools. But only when we grow bored and decide to move on to higher pursuits of symbolic reasoning; then and not a moment before will we leave you to play in the heretofore unimaginable sandbox of graphical programming tools. Or maybe we'll just design some special programs that can program on our behalf instead, and you can blurt out a few human-friendly (shiver) incantations, and watch them interpret and build your most likely imprecise instructions into most likely unworkable derivative codes. Or you can just take up LOGO like they told you to when you were but a school child in the... normal classes.

Well they were definitely building something that distracted them. Because in all my years of web development, IE has definitely been the most standards-compliant browser. I've never heard of a situation in which IE did not render something correctly, or in a non-standard fashion, or in any kind of fashion that causes developers to scream at the screen, angrily toss their mouse outside the window, and yell foul obscenities at a Bill Gates they cannot see, in a place far away where they cannot touch.